Email was supposed to free up time in workplace
communications: Send some in lieu of an in-person meeting! Work remotely! Take
your time crafting one instead of blurting out something stupid! But now that
everyone is so instantly reachable, work email has slipped its tentacles into
our off-the-clock lives, subtly demanding evening responses and extending the
workday indefinitely.

Now, 52% of Americans check their e-mail before and after
work, even when they take a sick day; ignoring email can seem more stressful
than dashing off a quick response. But all that continuous connection comes at
a cost to our health, finds new research published in the Journal of
Occupational Health Psychology.

Larissa Barber, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at
Northern Illinois University, has a name for this phenomenon: telepressure.
It’s the urge to respond immediately to work-related messages, no matter when
they come. “It’s like your to-do list is piling up, so you’re cognitively
ruminating over these things in the evening and re-exposing yourself to
workplace stressors,” Barber says.

This continuous work connection has very real health
effects, the study found: employees who reported more telepressure also
reported worse sleep, higher levels of burnout and more health-related absences
from work. “When people don’t have this recovery time, it switches them into an
exhaustion state, so they go to work the next day not being engaged,” Barber
says.

Why do we feel this need to reply so fast? Nobody’s forcing
us to respond—only 21% of workplaces have policies about communication use
outside of work hours, found a 2012 survey from the Society of Human Resource
Management. “It’s so new to us, this idea of boundary-less work, that we’re
just not sure how to manage it yet,” Barber says.

Barber’s study also looked at whether individual traits
predicted who felt telepressured, or if being a type-A overachiever made you
more or less susceptible than those with more laidback working habits. Her
results revealed that individual differences are only weakly
associated—telepressure is a workplace problem, not a worker problem. We learn
how to respond to email through our colleagues’ behavior, she found, and it’s a
consequence of the social dynamics within a work environment.

“ ’As soon as possible’ means different things to different
people, but of course if you’re nervous about impressing your boss or co-workers,
you probably think it needs to be immediately,” says Barber.

How can you make yourself a little less telestressed? First,
think about where your own telepressure is coming from, Barber says. It may be
worth having a conversation with your supervisor about email expectations—or,
if you’re the boss, try to be a good role model for connectivity and recovery,
Barber says.

Changing the conversational nature of your emails also
helps. “We’ll talk to people like we’re having those synchronous conversations,
face-to-face,” she says. “We’ll send an email and say, ‘Hey, what do you want
to do for lunch today?’” Conversational back-and-forth emails like that all but
demand an immediate response, partly emails like that all but demand an
immediate response, partly because it seems rude not to reply. But being
explicit about the purpose and timeline of your email really helps.

Barber
keeps a kind of email office hours, letting her inquirers know what time she’s
available to answer messages. She ends her emails to me with phrases like “No
need to respond to this message” and “I look forward to hearing from you
between 8:30-11:30am tomorrow”—and it does feel pretty satisfying.

But as much as we hate being telepressured, we absolutely
love telepressuring others. “We all get kind of used to that immediate
gratification of getting fast responses and having those communications that
are complete,” Barber says. “We all like it when other people are
telepressured, because it helps us complete our tasks faster.” Still, it’s
neither sustainable nor good for our health—and it might take an email
revolution of a different sort to change things.